This testimony summarizes several key actions that federal agencies need
to complete or take to strengthen their management of the wildland fire
program, including the need to (1) develop a long-term, cohesive strategy
to reduce fuels and address wildland fire problems and (2) improve the
management of their efforts to contain the costs of preparing for and
responding to wildland fires.
...
For cost-containment efforts to be effective, the agencies need to
integrate cost-containment goals with the other goals of the wildland
fire program--such as protecting life, resources, and property--and to
recognize that trade-offs will be needed to meet desired goals within
the context of fiscal constraints.
Shades of SOX complaints: the U.S. GAO
reports that
the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)
is failing:
When we go out and conduct our security control reviews at federal agencies,
we often find serious and significant vulnerabilities in systems that
have been certified and accredited.
Part of it, I think, is just that agencies may be focusing on just
trying to get the systems certified and accredited but not effectively
implementing the processes that the certification and accreditation is
supposed to reflect.
Sounds like
they haven't implemented numerous simple security measures that were known
before FISMA, they don't have processes to do so, and they don't adequately
report what they're doing, even with FISMA.
What to do?
Congress is investigating Homeland Security's internal insecurity:
...hearing, the GAO witnesses will also describe an investigation they
conducted on a specific DHS network that is "riddled with significant
information security control weaknesses that place sensitive and
personally identifiable information at increased risk of unauthorized
disclosure."
The subcommittee also plans to air some of its concerns with the DHS
OneNet project, which is aimed at consolidating all of the agency's
information networks under one roof, and to question a perceived lack
of IT security funding by Charbo.
—
Homeland Security to detail IT attacks
Hearing will reveal findings of agency's internal investigation into risk of system attacks and other online threats,
By Matt Hines
InfoWorld,
June 15, 2007
Who could have predicted that putting all information networks under one
roof would make them vulnerable to attack?
That would have been like predicting that making all DHS and DoD computers
run one operating system would make them vulnerable to attack.
It appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for
the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in
the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for
Office 2007 users. The news is not good.
"Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that
are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around
previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept
any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007,
either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of
Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003
or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file)
before submitting to Science."
And here I thought maybe they were rejecting Word entirely.
Ah, it could happen.
Most papers in physics, mathematics, and computer science journals
are already formatted in TeX, if I'm not mistaken.
So there is some diversity in publishing software;
it's not all a monoculture.
Meanwhile, the main reason Science rejected Word 2007
is that it is not backwards compatible with previous versions of Word,
thus illustrating the Microsoft dilemma: stick with the old and retain
customers, or fix problems and lose some.
Not so big a dilemma with Word, perhaps.
How many submittors to Science are there, as compared with
business Word users?
But much more of a problem for security fixes that require breaking
backwards compatibility.
ActionBioscience.org: The figure "$33 trillion" was once projected as
the value of ecosystems globally. What do you think of this type of
economic analysis?
Polasky: The $33-trillion figure refers to one of the earliest studies
that was done on the value of ecosystem services. The lead author was
Robert Costanza. He and his coauthors tried to get at the notion of how
we can establish on a global basis what the value of ecosystem services
is. They came up with a number 33 trillion [USD] plus or minus a few
trillion. There are a number of problems with the study. The most basic
one is the question of what you are talking about when you consider all
the ecosystem services of Earth. The entire system is our life support
system. So what is our life support system worth? You don’t really
have to have a scientific study in order to answer that question. The
real value of the study was not the $33-trillion figure, which who knows
what that means, but that it spurred people to focus on these issues.
Such values can be big, and the dollar value isn't the only consideration.
There is a bit of risk in that we can't do without the biosphere,
and some risk management is in order.
Even beyond that obvious non-dollar value,
there are further questions of species diversity and esthetics.
Do we really want to kill off an ecosystem when we don't really know
what it's doing for us,
and do we all want to live surrounded by concrete?
Microsoft claims that I (and possibly you, dear reader)
am violating 235 of its patents on Windows by running Ubuntu Linux:
After many earlier rounds of saber-rattling and FUD, Microsoft has
announced that Free Software users -- including everyone who, like me,
uses Ubuntu Linux -- are violating at least 235 of Microsoft's patents,
though they don't say which ones. Microsoft are now threatening end users
of GNU/Linux (that's you and me again) with lawsuits unless we pay them
protection money. "Nice operating system you got there, it'd be a shame
if something were to happen to it."
The Microsoft position is this: even if you don't use Windows, you still
have to pay them as much money as they would have gotten for selling
you a copy of it.
While one of the commenters seems to mostly know people who like Vista,
so far I haven't found anybody I know who does; could be it's who you know.
Apparently
Dell knows quite a few people who don't want Vista,
and the Houston Chronicle talked to some of them.
The people I talk to think Ubuntu Linux is just as good as Vista,
and requires fewer resources.
Sort of like this opinion:
except for perhaps some Windows-specific applications,
why not switch to Ubuntu?
Dell is also moving to supply Ubuntu as a native operating system
within weeks.
Dell started supplying Linux (without Windows) to its customers a while ago.
Now it's started supplying XP instead of Vista.
What does that mean?
What happened is the OEMs revolted in the background and forced
Microsoft's hand. This is a big neon sign above MeII saying
'FAILURE'. Blink blink blink. OK, MeII won't fail, they have OEMs whipped
and threatened into a corner, it will sell, but you can almost hear the
defectors marching toward Linux. This is a watershed.
The long-term goal for the Air Force is to have real-time standard
configuration management. Heitkamp said right now Air Force software
ensures that a laptop or PC connected to the network has the standard
configuration every 90 minutes. The service by 2008 hopes to have the
real-time enforcement running, he said.
“We are fairly good now, but we will be much better next year,”
Heitkamp said. “Moving to a standard desktop is about governance and
policy, not technology. Our vision is real-time desktop management.”
Ease of management.
What could be wrong with that?
Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed The author examines societies from the smallest (Tikopia) to the largest (China) and why they have succeeded or failed, where failure has included warfare, poverty, depopulation, and complete extinction. He thought he could do this purely through examining how societies damaged their environments, but discovered he also had to consider climate change, hostile neighbors, trading partners, and reactions of the society to all of those, including re-evaluating how the society's basic suppositions affect survival in changed conditions.
It looks like
technological security isn't the only kind disorganized in government.
The latest GAO report about wildfires seems like more smoke than fire:
I'm having a little difficulty finding historical statistics on wildfires.
Here's someone's understanding:
Well, you go away for the weekend, and
Dell started supplying Linux (without Windows) to its customers a while ago.
Now it's started supplying XP instead of Vista.
What does that mean?
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